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Thursday, October 13, 2016

The
death of major one of the major theatrical figures of Los Angeles on Sunday, October
2, 2016 came as a shock to many, and particularly to Howard and me, who’d seen
the Davidsons just a few weeks earlier at the MET opera HD production in
Century City.

Although we’d known Gordon Davidson for
several years, we didn’t get a chance to talk with him on that occasion, a
situation which I now regret. He looked healthy, but also, one has to admit, a
little frail, and I’m not certain he recognized us, even though we sat only a
few seats away. I had even recently seen him at an opening night production of A View from the Bridge at the Ahmanson Theater
on September 14, but in the swirl of the opening night crowd, I didn’t have the
possibility of speaking to him.

Much has been written about his
remarkable career, the invitation by Dorothy Chandler to have him run the then-newly
founded Mark Taper Forum, and his numerous successful productions—not all plays
which I openly admire, but important in developing an audience for contemporary
theater nonetheless—including The Devils (controversial,
to the say the least),In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, Children of a Lesser God, and Tony
Kushner’s absolutely remarkable Angels in
America.

I recall when we first moved to Los
Angeles, how my friend Marjorie Perloff expressed her delight in a Taper season
devoted to several of Beckett’s plays, but was disgusted by the audience lack
of attendance and their disparagement of these works. A couple of years ago,
after Davidsons’ retirement from that organization, Howard and I saw a
brilliant revival of Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot at the Taper, with full attendance and admiring reviews, so
Davidsons’ great foresight finally did pay off.

Although Davidson produced many more
traditional works, he always attempted to push the envelope, so to speak,
introducing new works whenever he could. Davidson liked “issues,” however, more
than “experiments” in his plays. As he, himself, put it: “I believe it must be
the job of theater to take hard looks at life, at issues people don’t always
want to confront. They will listen to what is said to them from a stage. That
is the power of theater. I respect it. I am in awe of it.”

And, indeed, he did many “issue” plays,
including The Shadow Box, for which
he received a Tony Award, The Great God
Brown, and a wonderful revival of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Perhaps his best known and most successful issue-oriented
play was Luis Valdez’s musical play from 1978, Zoot Suit, presented in 1978 with Edward James Olmos in the lead
role. Artist Carlos Almaraz painted some of the sets. It played to full houses
for a year before it moved on to Broadway, introducing wealthy white audiences
of the Bunker Hill theaters to a whole new theatrical tradition. That work,
coincidentally, is scheduled to be revived at the Taper later this year, an
event that Howard and I can’t wait to experience.

I first met Davidson when I asked him to
join the board of the Sun & Moon Press American Theater in Literature
Series, which he gladly agreed to, occasionally attending Sun & Moon
literary salons.

I worked with him, indirectly, when he
invited director Peter Sellars to stage at the Taper playwright Robert
Auletta’s modern version of Æschylus’ The
Persians in 1993. Doing away with costumes and sets and placing the play
firmly into the US wartime activities in Iraq, Sellar’s production was nearly
unbearable, for much of the Taper audience, to watch. I know because, having
published the play in my Sun & Moon American Theater in Literature series
in time for this production, I attended almost every night, selling copies
before and after the performances. Nearly every night, half of the audience
stormed out in anger, and I think I sold very few copies. But I admired
Davidson for bringing this play to his stage. It took guts.

Even if Davidson did not always present
the most innovative works, however, he permanently changed the theater scene in
Los Angeles, lighting a fire under its dormant theatrical scene until we
finally see today a wide range of theatrical events that in variety and number
(there are literally hundreds of small amateur theaters throughout the
metropolitan area) seems richer, in some respects, than New York’s Off
Broadway. And now, also, with the Taper and Ahmanson on Bunker Hill, the Kirk
Douglas Theater in Culver City (also a result of Davidson’s vision), the Wallis
Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills, the Broad Theatre in Santa Monica, and the Geffen
Playhouse, and the Pantages in Hollywood, Los Angeles might be said to contain
a kind of mini-Broadway scattered across its vast spaces.

Davidson, finally, was a natural
charmer. He always had a smile, at least at the many social events in which
Howard and I met him, and spoke, if often excitedly, gently, with a slightly
bemused attitude. He was, always, a friend, inviting you into his theatrical
vision. Los Angeles will truly miss him.

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Richard
Wagner (writer and composer) Tristan und
Isolde / Live H.D. broadcast from the New York Metropolitan Opera on
October 8, 2016 / I attended with Howard Fox

The
first High Definition production of the new Metropolitan Opera season, Richard
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde,is sublime, with outstanding performances
by the great soprano Nina Stemme, Stuart Nelson (singing only his second
Tristan), Ekaterina Gubanova as the intruding servant Brangäne, René Pape as
King Marke, Evegeny Nikitin, singing the smaller role of Tristan’s loyal allay
Kurwenal, and, perhaps most importantly, Simon Rattle conducting of the Met’s
great orchestra.

Yet this version of Tristan und Isolde is often equally leaden and confusing through
production director Mariusz Trebliński’s decision to set the opera on a war ship
in Act One, and upon another ship and in that ship’s enormous lower-deck
storeroom filled with large containers of what appear to be weapons all stamped
with “Warning” in Act Two. The return to Tristan’s childhood home, where Kurwenal
has set up like a hospital room, where other portions of the home, having
undergone a fire years earlier, appear ready to collapse, is nearly inexplicable,
particularly when Tristan retrieves his father’s military jacket from the floor
of a nearly creosote leaden room.

On top of this, set designer Boris
Kudlička’s and projection designer Bartek Macias’ sets and projections
sometimes clumsily recreated the story of the young Tristan’s loss of his
mother (in child-birth) and father, along with the quite unexplained torching
of their home and the woods around, further making murky what is generally a
fairly simple tale of love, consuming desire, death, and transfiguration.

Yes, these various elements do keep our
eyes quite busy during the opera’s many long, static passages; and certainly
they help to make clear that part of Tristan’s determination to find love—first
in his obedience of and service to the King of Cornwall and, later, in his love
of Isolde—has a great deal to do with his being an orphan. The worlds of
Tristan’s Brittany, Isolde’s Ireland, and Marke’s Cornwall, moreover, obviously
are structures of military might achieved through violence—just the kind of
world in which Wagner generally locates his operas. Everyone here is a loyal
warrior or a traitor, with heroes being awarded and traitors (i.e, the other
side) being destroyed.

But these things are fairly obvious
within the long narrative passages Tristan and Isolde recount throughout the
opera, and hardly need be reasserted with such heavy handed imagery and
metaphorical projections.

At moments, particularly the long, long
love duet in Act II, the projections of clouds and spinning planets truly do
give rise to the kind of splendiferous visions being experienced by the loving
couple, particularly, as Brangäne interrupts their “maddened” lovemaking with
her beautiful off-stage song of
warning—a moment, as Rattle himself described it, of near transcendence. But,
for the most part, the maritime imagery and weapon’s room storage scenes seemed
in opposition to the lovers’ Schopenhauerian ruminations about day/death and
night/love. The fact that their verbal love play verges, in itself, on
gobbledygook is certainly reiterated by the drab surroundings of this
production.

And finally, the metaphorical ghosts of
both Tristan’s child-self and his dead father, particularly in Act
Three—although again much-needed visual elements while Tristan lies
dying—created more murkiness than clarity. It’s clear that Tristan is being
visited by the ghosts of the past, but a child flashing the light of a
cigarette-lighter into the dying man’s eyes seems nearly ludicrous—if not
dangerous.

As in all successful renditions of this
great opera, moreover, any singer who credibly endures it is a wonder. Here,
despite my cavils, this production, particularly given Rattle’s languid and
highly nuanced musical direction, along with Stemme’s beautifully balanced and
modulated singing and acting, will be recognized as one of the greatest of this
opera’s performances.

Finally, even if by slashing her wrists, Isolde
doesn’t quite go “gently into that good night,” it allows her to represent her
“Liebestod” as a gradual transformation of worlds through the gradual loss of
blood, making Marke’s and Brangäne’s reentries, once again, simple intrusions
on the inseparable lover’s lives. In
Tristan’s and Isolde’s love there is no room for others, not even room for living.